Education has two main components. One is teaching information (e.g., facts). The other is improving the individual's thinking abilities, things like memory, problem solving, and creative thinking School pedagogy has focused primarily on the first of the two—teaching information. The effort to improve thinking has almost exclusively been through learning the information. For example, attention and memory were strengthened by having students memorize list of facts and recite poems from memory. The focus on conveying information has been necessary because very little was known about how to directly strengthen thinking itself. Recent advances in cognitive science and neuroscience, along with modern computer technology, make possible a change in education. Computer-based brain exercises and specific physical exercises synergistically and powerfully promote development of the neurocognitive foundations of thought. This means that education can move from a primary focus on learning facts to a balanced curriculum that equally and directly promotes development of thinking itself.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (“ADHD”) is a neurodevelopmental disorder marked by a failure to develop age-appropriate executive functions to sustain and direct attention, inhibit response to task-irrelevant stimuli and contain and down regulate internally generated urges for action. A variety of other cognitive functions are compromised, perhaps in part secondary to the aforementioned deficits and perhaps as part of the primary pathology. These include a group of cognitive operations often labeled “executive functions” that depend heavily on activity in the frontal and parietal lobes, areas of the brain actively developing when the full array of functions compromised in ADHD are themselves developing and when symptoms of ADHD often lead to clinical diagnosis. This complex of dysfunctions exacerbates one another and alters interactions with the social environment so as to limit opportunities that promote normal development and create experiences that promote deviant development. By the time individuals with ADHD are teenagers and young adults they over represented among drug users, criminals and the un- and under-employed. With an estimated prevalence world wide of 5%, ADHD is a significant public health problem associated with high individual, family and social costs. Similar knowledge from cognitive and neuroscience and computer technology can also be used to treat childhood neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD, as well as the cognitive deficits associated with neuropsychiatric disorders. These treatment programs are neuroscience and brain based, but non-pharmacologic.
Thus, there is a need to incorporate physical activity and cognitive exercises to generate educational programs and/or to treat psychiatric disorders, which include exercises designed specifically to engage and promote development of specific neurocognitive systems implicated by the disorder, and to integrate such exercises with computer exercises that engage those same neurocognitive systems.